>NB: this post is not connected to this week´s “Bait in the Box” quotation. This review will appear tomorrow, Friday, as usual.

As my previous Sherlock Holmes post indicates, Conan Doyle did include women in his crime stories – when they suited a purpose. As in real, Victorian life, Conan Doyle´s women belonged to a strict social hierarchy, and today I am going to take a look at the working class woman. Any respectable middle-class household would have at least one maid, preferably more, and often a cook as well. These servants are faceless and nameless unless they appear several times in a story, making a name convenient.

One of the few girls with a name is Edith Baxter from “Silver Blaze”. She brings supper to a stable boy when a stranger suddenly turns up and begins questioning her. The dialogue is not relevant here, but her reactions contribute to a characterization of the Victorian maid, “She was frightened by the earnestness of his manner” – “the girl fled away to the house…” A similar example is found in “The Crooked Man”. When their master had died a mysterious and terrible death, “the maids were too distracted with fear to be of any assistance.”

Even much older working class women were liable to uncontrollable fear, e.g. the two housekeepers of “The Sign of Four”, and “The Hound of the Baskervilles”. Mrs Bernstone, Bartholomew Sholto´s housekeeper, is introduced thus, “… there sounded through the silent night the saddest and most pitiful of sounds – the shrill, broken whimpering of a frightened woman.”

Another night, in another place, the Barrymores, butler and housekeeper of Baskerville Hall, are taken by surprise, “… Mrs Barrymore, paler and more horrorstruck than her husband, was standing at the door.” Just like Mrs Bernstone, she is unable to control her feelings, and she also cries in the night. “And then suddenly, in the very dead of the night, there came a sound to my [Watson´s] ears, clear, resonant and unmistakable. It was the sob of a woman, the muffled, strangling gasp of one who is torn by an uncontrollable sorrow.”

Working class women did not receive much formal education (or informal, for that matter), and they were not supposed to be as clever or polite as other women. In the story of “The Yellow Face”, the anxious Mr Munro is turned out by his new neighbour, an elderly servant, with a ´churlish rebuff´. In another story we meet the mother of William the coachman who has just been killed. We are told that she is old and deaf, and that “the shock has made her half-witted, but I understand that she was never very bright.”

The above-mentioned housekeeper, Mrs Barrymore, is worth returning to as she is one of the working class women who is characterized most thoroughly. In Dr Watson´s words, “she is a heavy, solid person, very limited, intensely respectable…” Other epithets are “large, heavy-featured, stern, bulky”. Apparently this lump of a woman is the proto-type of the female servant.

If we turn to Mrs Mordecai Smith, wife of the boathouse keeper of “The Sign of Four, we will see that she was “a stoutish, red-faced woman with a large sponge in her hand.” Another apt description, this time of the above-mentioned servant from “The Yellow Face” reads, “a tall, gaunt woman, with a harsh, forbidding face.” For a last example of a ´servant exterior´ I have selected Mrs Tangey from “The Naval Treaty” who is “a large, coarse-faced, elderly woman, in an apron.”

So far, the descriptions of these working class women have been discouraging, but it is possible to find a few positive characteristics as well. Many of the servants are highly respectable, and in spite of their limitations they are often ´good´ and ´faithful´ girls.

A few women are difficult to place socially, e.g. Mrs Laura Lyons, the mysterious woman of “The Hound of the Baskervilles”. Her father is a neighbour of Sir Henry´s but she has “made a rash marriage” with an artist who has deserted her. She is now forced to support herself as a typist, and the fact that she has married beneath her, puts her in a delicate position between the middle and the working class. As there is always a close connection between looks and position in Victorian literature, Dr Watson´s description of her does not come as a great surprise: “The first impression left by Mrs Lyons was one of extreme beauty.” – “But the second was criticism. There was something subtly wrong with the face, some coarseness of expression, some hardness, perhaps of eye, some looseness of lip which marred its perfect beauty.”

It might be argued, of course, that what ´marred´ her was her connection with the villain, rather than her place in society, but if we compare her to another woman in the same book, ´Miss´ Stapleton, her looks are in no way destroyed by the fact that she is married to the same villain and knows a lot more about what is going on. Here, as in other stories, society seems to accept that a woman is loyal to the man she is married to, no matter what he has done.

>Fascinating, Dorte H. I’m currently writing about the Victorian servant class in England, which has been a hard thing to research. The servants were definitely to be seen and not heard. But it is possible after lots of digging to get some stories nowadays about these nameless, faceless people.

>Julia, I am glad you like it. I think the Victorian period is so interesting, but not only for something good. As my parents belonged to the working class and I am a woman, I am happy I was born 100 years later🙂

>I allways found Laurie R. Kings Mary Russel series entertaining and amusing. Mary Russel is the equal of the Great Holmes, as clever and vigorous as he is.Allthough Mary Russel isn’t a working class woman (she’s actually well of), I can’t help but see her as a woman writers revenge over Conan Doyle. And since Doyle is dead, there’s nothing he can do about it.That’s amusing🙂